Mapping race: Multiracial people and racial category construction in the United States and Britain |
Mapping race: Multiracial people and racial category construction in the United States and Britain
Immigrants & Minorities
Volume 15, Issue 2 (July 1996)
pages 107-119
DOI: 10.1080/02619288.1996.9974883
Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
The social construction of what are often called ‘racial’ categories has proceeded differently in different places. The bases of ascription and group identity, the placement of the boundaries between groups, and the power dynamics between groups have changed dramatically over time and social and political circumstance in each place. This article is a meditation and speculation on the ways that racial categories have been constructed and have changed in the United States and Britain over the course of the twentieth century.’ It uses the identity situations of people of multiple ancestries – Black and White, Asian and African and so on – as a tool to deconstruct the meanings assigned to racial categories and the power dynamics that underly those categories. The article lays out some things that the situation of multiracial people – people some of whose ancestors were Africans and some of whose ancestors came from somewhere else – tells us about the ways racial categories and meanings have evolved over the course of the twentieth century in the United States and in Britain. It finds, in sum, that White Americans have long had clearer ideas than White Britons about what they wanted to do with race; that those clear categories in the US are now breaking down, partly because of the rise of a multiracial consciousness on the part of some people of mixed parentage; and that a British innovation of the 1970s and the 1980s, a common Black identity for all non-White Britons, is no longer working very well, either.
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Tags: Immigrants & Minorities, Paul R. Spickard, Paul Spickard